Desirably, shoppers should be able to select from among plural different credit cards when making purchases, and not be tied to a single payment service. Having a variety of credit card payment options provides a variety of advantages.
For example, some credit card providers offer promotions that make spending on one card more attractive than another (e.g., double-miles on your Alaska Airlines Visa card for gas and grocery purchases made during February). Other promotions sometime include a lump-sum award of miles for new account holders after a threshold charge total has been reached (e.g., get 50,000 miles on your new CapitalOne Visa card after you've made $5,000 of purchases within the first five months.) At still other times, a shopper may be working to accumulate purchases on one particular card in order to reach a desired reward level (e.g., reaching 50,000 miles to qualify for a Delta ticket to Europe).
The ability to easily select a desired card from among an assortment of cards is a feature lacking in many existing mobile payment systems. The legacy physical cards that embody the service provider brands and their capabilities are expensive to produce and have security weakness that can be mitigated in mobile payment systems. The look, feel, and user interfaces for physical cards are familiar and well understood. Existing mobile payments solutions involve numerous changes and new learning to operate.
In accordance with one aspect of the present technology, a smartphone programmed with a virtual wallet provides a user interface to present a wallet of virtual credit cards from which a user can pick when making a purchase. Data is conveyed optically from the phone to a cooperating system, such as a point of sale terminal or another smartphone. Preferably, the phone containing the virtual cards presents a graphical illustration of the selected card on the screen. Hidden in this graphical illustration (i.e., steganographically encoded) is transaction data. This transaction data may provide information about the selected card, and may also provide context data used to create a session key for security. Of course, a virtual wallet may receive payments, credits and rewards, as well as initiate payments.
Through use of the present technology, merchants can obtain the digital security advantages associated with “chip card”-based payment systems, without investing in interface hardware that has no other use, using virtual cards that have no costs of manufacture and distribution. The technology is secure, easy, economical, and reliable.
The foregoing and other features and advantages of the present technology will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.